The Increasing Poverty of the Samurai in Tokugawa Japan, 1600–1868

That the ruling samurai class suffered increasing poverty during the Tokugawa period is accepted, without dissent, by all students of Japanese history. However, this view is based primarily on contemporary descriptions of the financial distress felt by the samurai class and has never been established empirically through the use of quantitative data. Most of the literature supporting this long accepted view is highly impressionistic and fails even to define precisely what is meant by increasing poverty. Thus, the writers on this subject use the phrase “increasing poverty” to mean variously a decline in real income, a lagging increase in real income vis-a-vis that of other classes (merchants, artisans, and peasants), or increasing “psychological poverty” experienced due to increasing expectations while real income was rising less rapidly. Authors not infrequently use these different concepts of “increasing poverty” interchangeably.